Quick Guide To Azure Monitoring and Optimization Tools

Microsoft Azure provides multiple tools to monitor and optimize your infrastructure and applications based on your business goals and spending needs. Monitoring your Azure resources such as VMs, applications, and PaaS services enables you to establish a performance baseline and provide insights on how to optimize Azure resources for better ROI.

Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor allows customers to monitor their Azure resources proactively and gain insights into resource usage and key performance indicators, including component level metrics for virtual machines, storage accounts, and Azure Functions. Azure Monitor also includes alerts that notify you when a service has undergone a change in behavior or state.

Azure Monitor cloud usage report provides insights on resource use, including how much every subscription cost.

You'll also be able to see more details about specific events such as authentication attempts, deployment errors, instance creation times, and anomalous events like alerts for metrics outside the defined threshold levels.

There are three tools available in Azure Monitor: Metrics Explorer, Azure Monitor Logs, and Application Insights.

Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor provides guidance on optimizing Azure apps and production environments by identifying potential issues and suggestions to optimize Azure resources. Azure Advisor also monitors your usage and suggests cost-saving opportunities.

Azure Advisor Features

• Security: monitors potential threats and vulnerabilities that might lead to potential security breaches.
• Performance: Advisor helps increase applications' reliability and performance. Some of the performance recommendations include database performance, Redis Cache performance, and App Service performance.
• Cost: Advisor recommends cost optimization opportunities based on usage analytics.
• High Availability: Helps ensure and improve the continuity of your business-critical operations.

Azure Automation

Azure Automation is an Azure service that enables you to model, orchestrate, and manage complex application deployments across heterogeneous enterprise environments. It provides a highly scalable and reliable way to manage these operations. Azure Automation uses a runbook-first approach for complex modeling operations as a sequence of steps, known as runbooks.

You can choose between orchestrations or templates to build your automation runbooks and leverage the entire library of PowerShell cmdlets to script any needs not currently covered by Azure.

Azure Cost Management

Azure Cost Management monitors the costs associated with your Azure subscriptions, data transfer, virtual machines, storage costs, and more.

It offers cost visualization per service type with the aim of optimizing the cost structure. Azure Billing provides real-time billing information and financial insights into account spending trends.

Azure Sentinel

Azure Sentinel is a Security Information Event Management service (SIEM). Azure Sentinel collects telemetry and generates investigative leads with Azure endpoint management to help identify targeted attacks on Azure resources.

Sentinel delivers continuous visibility into attacks and cyber-threats targeting your applications and workloads running in the cloud or on-premise. It also provides complete life-cycle detection of threats, including lateral movement, data exfiltration, root cause analysis, and next-best action. Azure Sentinel significantly reduces the time it takes to detect security breaches by up to 80%.